A letter to the editor of the Provincetown Advocate, written on The Naturist Society’s letterhead and signed by its founder, Lee Baxandall, dated January 11, 1989. It responds to Lisbeth Lipari’s article “Dissension Rips Nudists, Feminists,” published in the Advocate on December 22, 1988, and asks the paper to print his statement and to permit The Naturist Society to reject Craft’s allegations as libel.

The letter is dated the same day as Craft’s formal retraction demand to John L. Kyff, Jr. over his article “Craft Wins — Nudists Lose.” It advances the same argument Kyff had made two months earlier in Bare In Mind: that Craft’s political objections were personal grievance following the termination of her employment. Kyff wrote that she had “seemingly abruptly changed her mind” after being fired; Baxandall writes that “at bottom Craft is bitter that she has lost a most comfortable privileged position.” The organization’s legal coordinator and its founder made the same case in two publications within eight weeks.

Two denials give the document its documentary value. Baxandall calls “outrageous” the claim that Clothed with the Sun exploited women and that child abusers sheltered in the naturist movement. He then states that the allegation that “one of the Naturist Society’s official photographers was charged with child molestation at a nudist gathering this summer” is untrue, and demands the paper reject it as libel. This document does not adjudicate the specific photographer allegation. It fixes in place a dated position statement, made on organizational letterhead by the founder of the organization, four months after the September 1988 Cape Cod withdrawal statement and supporters’ petition had circulated a warning naming photographers women in the movement were told to be wary of — and years before the documentation assembled in the Uncommon Desires series and the Nudist/Naturist Hall of Shame was public. It is reproduced so that what was said in 1989 can be read alongside what the record shows. Part of the Nikki Craft Archival Project. The introduction argues that the personalization of Craft’s objections — the same argument Kyff had made — functioned as the mechanism by which warnings about child sexual abuse inside the movement were set aside without being examined, and that both letters are therefore documents of institutional denial. It does not claim either man knew; naiveté and denialism are sufficient to account for the letter, and the document cannot settle which applied. The introduction also maps the letter onto DARVO — Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender — the pattern named by the psychologist Jennifer J. Freyd to describe how offenders and institutions respond to allegations of abuse, noting that the pattern describes the shape of a response and does not establish what its author knew. The introduction is written to be useful beyond this case. Sections titled “Why it works on women,” “What this protects,” and “Recognizing it” set out why discrediting vocabulary applied to women requires no evidence and cannot be disproven; why warnings about child sexual abuse inside institutions come almost exclusively from insiders whose proximity is then used to dismiss them, leaving such institutions structurally protected without any policy of concealment; and what a woman encountering the same pattern can expect and do — that the response will address her motives rather than her claim, that it is addressed to bystanders rather than to her, that it succeeds by producing inaction rather than disbelief, and that the reflex leaves documents behind which read very differently decades later.

Keywords

Lee Baxandall, Nikki Craft, The Naturist Society, Provincetown Advocate, Lisbeth Lipari, John Kyff, Clothed with the Sun, Craft v. Hodel, Cape Cod National Seashore, Herring Cove Beach, naturism, nudism, radical feminism, libel, child molestation allegations, movement press, 1989, primary source, letter to the editor, Truro Massachusetts, feminist activism, institutional denial, DARVO, Jennifer Freyd, deny attack reverse victim and offender, betrayal trauma, institutional betrayal, Preying Mantis Women’s Brigade, Hustler magazine, Larry Flynt, whistleblower retaliation, credibility attack, victim blaming, institutional protection of abusers, silencing women, misogyny, bystander inaction

Series

Primary Source Documents

License

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International). The scan is reproduced for documentation, criticism, and historical research.

Creation date

Letter dated January 11, 1989. This documented edition compiled July 29, 2026.

Language

English

Cover image recommendation

SPLIT_Baxandall_Letter_to_The_Advocate.jpg — the full letter on Naturist Society letterhead, showing the signature and date.

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